You may have read that Groupon is fighting to get its Australian ccTLD domain name. It had offered to pay over a quarter of a million dollars for the domain name and a similar trademark filing. It seems a bit odd that a company would seemingly reward an alleged cybersquatter for this much money, but Groupon needs this (and similar) domain names ASAP.

Groupon is a rapidly growing company in a vertical that has very few barriers to entry. Local companies with the manpower and desire to pound the pavement can work with local businesses and start their own entities. As businesses go, this one is not too difficult to duplicate, although it isn’t easy to scale.

Groupon is in the phase where they are quickly growing around the world, be it with acquisitions of large enough competitors that they can enter markets rapidly, or by entering the market and becoming the dominant presence. Groupon is fast becoming known throughout the world as THE company that offers group deals.

In addition to using a universal .com domain name (Groupon.com), the company is embracing local ccTLDs. The company operates sites like Groupon.ca, Groupon.de, Groupon.com.mx, Groupon.co.uk, Groupon.es, Groupon.fr, Groupon.co.il, Groupon.jp, Groupon.cn, and many others, which are highly targeted.

With its rapid growth, the company probably doesn’t have the time to wait for the settlement of lawsuits or determination of UDRPs to get the domain names it wants to operate. Instead, the money is less important to this well funded company than the time it will take to get the domain name via UDRP and/or lawsuit.

It’s interesting to watch Groupon seemingly reward others for grabbing Groupon ccTLDs, but domain investors should note that this is an isolated situation, and doing so with other trademarks can be very risky and expensive to defend.

About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has sold seven figures worth of domain names in the last five years. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest.

Comments (6)

As you mention in your article, here in Chicago there are numerous newspapers and other entities that are springing up as competition to Groupon. I subscribe to a couple of the well known aggregators, Dealery and Yipit, to keep track of all of the deals.

I would not say that Groupon stands out at all, and each of my friends has their own favorites, depending upon their niche. Groupon, has fallen into this manicure/salon niche, that is not very appealing to me. And if the owners of the salon joints didn’t use their own workers as slave labor, the niche probably wouldn’t even exist.

It is not clear who will actually survive at the end, but large cities probably have room for several players.

Definitely an isolated situation. I can understand why Groupon is taking such a non-threatening stance to that group in Australia because Groupon certainly needs the domain now. But I would assume Groupon will make it very clear to them that their exceedingly generous offer has an expiration date.

What is most interesting about this topic, in my opinion, is how fast Groupon grew in popularity and then realized how important the domain names are to prevent brand dilution.

6 million companies — in the US alone — start-up every year. Many, if not a majority, fail at some point in time. They are all not trying to buy all of their business name TLDs and ccTLDs, for if they would run out of resources before they opened their doors.

Likewise, filing for a trademark in all major countries would be time and resource intensive and prohibitive.

There’s no easy answer but to realize that if a company goes through such enormous growth, buying up the domain names that were purchased is one of the pains they’ll have to deal with to secure their branding. And it’s a lot more inexpensive than litigating every one.

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